Media Mentions

The evolution of work is becoming a battle between flexibility and stability. The sharing economy offers people unprecedented opportunities to work when, where, and as much as they want. But it also threatens a future in which stable, well-paying jobs cede to temporary gigs with few protections. Lawmakers wonder: How do we stoke new-economy industries without burning up old-economy security?...Yes, flexibility is desirable. But it is no substitute for security, said Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. Most gig workers, of course, are classified as independent contractors and consequently not covered by laws related to minimum wage, workers' comp, overtime, and other employee benefits and protections. "Many workers in the online platform economy are low-wage workers. Drivers. Cleaners. Home-care workers," Block said. "They have little ability to shoulder the risks to their livelihoods and families that come with the loss of the basic social safety net."

The Department of Education will review a series of Title IX guidelines that spurred Harvard and universities across the country to overhaul their response to sexual assault on campus, drawing concern from some anti-sexual assault activists at Harvard. During a speech at George Mason University Thursday, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos said the department will reconsider the Obama-era policies after a public review process...Harvard Law professor Janet Halley—who is part of a group of Law School faculty who have repeatedly criticized Obama-era Title IX guidance—said she is pleased DeVos is seeking public input. Halley and three other Law School professors sent a memo to the Department of Education in August, urging the department to scale back its definition of sexual harassment. “She’s going to go for public comment, which the previous administration never did on this issue. That’s more democratic and I think that’s a good thing,” Halley said, although she later added, “I am by no means declaring an alliance with the Trump administration.”

...Law dean John Manning said at a dedication ceremony Tuesday that the law school should be open about its origins and ties to the slave trade. “Our school was founded with wealth generated through the profoundly immoral institution of slavery,”...The text of the plaque was drafted by history and law professor Annette Gordon-Reed, who has written extensively on Thomas Jefferson’s slaves...Gordon-Reed noted during the dedication ceremony on Tuesday that the memorial does not include the names of the slaves whose toil helped fund the law school’s founding, because many of their names are unknown. “The words are designed to invoke all of their spirits and bring them into our minds and our memories with the hope that it will spur us to try to bring to the world what was not give to them: the law’s protection and regard, and justice.” But some slave names were recorded in documents, which were read aloud at the dedication by law professor Janet Halley.

A plan to rescind protections for nearly a million undocumented immigrants who grew up in the United States has caused confusion and concern on college campuses, including in Massachusetts...The workload has been pretty frantic in the last couple of weeks," said Jason Corral of the Immigration and Refugee Clinic at Harvard University. Corral was hired by Harvard in response to the President's rhetoric on immigration during the campaign. In recent weeks, they have been preparing for Tuesday's announcement, anticipating that several students would be impacted. "People that are not US citizens are concerned," Corral said, "In addition to this being a slap in the face to DACA students, I think it's symbolic of the tone the administration has taken in general."

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice claims it has the authority to use information submitted by Dreamers who applied for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to deport them now. It’s obviously wrong for the government to lure people in by the promise of freedom, then use what they have said against them. It may also be unconstitutional, a violation of due process that shocks the conscience and a violation of the Dreamers’ free-speech rights when they registered for DACA in the first place.

Midway through the list of names was when the crowd fell fully silent. Some 300 people, suddenly pinned in place, stood motionless in a half-circle around the outdoor podium where Janet Halley, Royall professor of law, was reading out the names of slaves who’d once belonged to Isaac Royall Jr., the eighteenth-century sugar-plantation owner whose fortune endowed Halley’s professorship and helped establish Harvard Law School...Inside Wasserstein Hall earlier in the evening, listeners had heard some of that complicated history from Warren visiting professor of American legal history Daniel Coquillette. The author of On the Battlefield of Merit: Harvard Law School, the First Century, he spoke not only about Royall, a brutal slave owner whose plantation in Antigua was notorious (he kept a 500-acre farm in Medford, too), but also about the school’s connections to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793—which most faculty members at the time strongly supported, Coquillette sai...After Coquillette’s remarks—and a panel discussion that followed, with Halley, Warren professor of American legal history Annette Gordon-Reed, Klein professor of law Randall Kennedy, and Schipper professor of law Bruce Mann—audience members filed out into the courtyard to see the new memorial revealed.

As part of Harvard University’s efforts to recognize its early ties to slavery, officials yesterday unveiled a memorial to honor the enslaved people whose work helped found Harvard Law School...Recognizing the legacy of slavery at the Law School is important for coming to terms with the past and for reminding future lawyers of their duty to make the legal system wiser and fairer, said John F. Manning, the School’s Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and professor of law...[Annette] Gordon-Reed, who has written extensively about slavery and who drafted the words on the plaque, said the memorial doesn’t contain names because it’s impossible to know the identities of all the Africans the Royalls enslaved in Antigua and Medford, whose work built much of the wealth used to found the Law School...In a touching moment during the ceremony, Janet Halley, the Royall Professor of Law, who has spoken openly about the connections between her chair and slavery, read aloud the names of those enslaved who were found listed in the Royalls’ records.

Michael Beckerman, president and chief executive of the Internet Association, told the House Education and the Workforce Committee it would be problematic to enact legislation that would ensure workers are labeled as employees, who are entitled to benefits, as opposed to independent contractors...Labor and employment laws do and should apply to this sector, Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, told the committee. Block said the application of current law should not stifle flexibility.

An op-ed by Andrew Manuel Crespo. We talk a lot in the Trump era about novel constitutional problems, and a lot about special prosecutors. But in the wake of President Trump’s controversial pardon of former Arizona Sheriff Joseph Arpaio, it’s important to talk about both at once, and to ask: Should the US District Court in Phoenix, which found Arpaio guilty of criminal contempt, now appoint a special prosecutor to defend that conviction, in the face of a pardon that might well be unconstitutional?

...Harvard President Drew Faust has prominently defended the DACA program, and called the order to rescind it "cruel." And after the election of Donald Trump, the university hired a full-time immigration attorney to handle the concerns — and possibly the cases — of students in the country illegally. That attorney, Jason Corral, attended this week's rally, and made a pledge: "What I'd like to do is to talk to every undocumented Harvard student and look to see if there's any underlying legal remedy that goes beyond DACA."

...There is no doubt that until recently, many women’s claims of sexual assault were reflexively and widely disregarded—or that many still are in some quarters...Action to redress that problem was—and is—fully warranted. But many of the remedies that have been pushed on campus in recent years are unjust to men, infantilize women, and ultimately undermine the legitimacy of the fight against sexual violence...As Jeannie Suk Gersen and her husband and Harvard Law School colleague, Jacob Gersen, wrote last year in a California Law Review article, “The Sex Bureaucracy,” the “conduct classified as illegal” on college campuses “has grown substantially, and indeed, it plausibly covers almost all sex students are having today.”...In a 2015 article for the Harvard Law Review, Janet Halley, a Harvard law professor, describes a case at an Oregon college in which a male student was investigated and told to stay away from a female student, resulting in the loss of his campus job and a move from his dorm.

Harvard Law School has installed a memorial honoring slaves who were owned by one of the school’s founders...Law dean John Manning said at Tuesday’s unveiling that “to be true to our complicated history, we must also shine a light on what we are not proud of.”

In announcing the Trump administration's phase-out of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions called DACA "an unconstitutional exercise of authority by the executive branch" under former President Barack Obama and argued that President Trump was pushed to review the program by "imminent litigation" from 10 state attorneys general...As Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith points out, the 2014 OLC opinion declaring DACA "a permissible exercise" of executive "discretion to enforce the immigration laws" is still up on the OLC website, "implying that it's still valid for the executive branch." If the office has written a new opinion on DACA, it hasn't posted it to the website yet. "Did Sessions consult OLC on this? If so, did OLC revise its views and/or withdraw the 2014 opinion?" Goldsmith asked on Twitter, adding, "If Sessions didn't consult OLC, what's the status of 2014 opinion? Will it be withdrawn?"

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. I arrived in Seoul, South Korea at the same time that President Trump was warning North Korea—just 35 miles away—that it may “face fire and fury like the world has never seen.” It gives a special flavor to a research trip to look around and ask yourself, “Are these the people with whom I’m going to be incinerated?” I wasn’t researching nuclear policy, though, but rather something that will be of vital importance if the peninsula doesn’t turn to ash: data. The Mayor of Seoul is taking steps that may be important to the development of more genuine democracy in South Korea.

...When asked by Mic, constitutional law scholars were split on whether DACA is legal — though a large number wrote Trump recently to argue for the program’s constitutionality...Laurence Tribe, a leading constitutional scholar who has been an outspoken Trump critic, said Trump’s disdain for DACA did not square with his travel ban action, a critique echoed by the legal scholars Mic interviewed across the board. “Trump argues for the religiously discriminatory travel ban by relying on sweeping presidential power to regulate immigration and then turns around and argues that clearly reasonable protection of involuntary child immigrants is beyond the power of the president.”

President Trump has nominated Robert Jackson to be a member of the Securities and Exchange Commission for the remainder of a five-year term expiring June 5, 2019. Jackson is a professor at Columbia Law School and director of its program on corporate law and policy...In a recent research paper, “Shining Light on Corporate Political Spending,” Harvard Professor Lucian Bebchuk and Jackson outlined some of what they expect the SEC will have to address as it proceeds with rulemaking. First, it will need to determine the types of political spending covered by a rule and which public companies will be subject to it. Should smaller companies be exempted from the rules, for example, or is a scaled disclosure requirement warranted?

Breaking ranks with many of their fellow Republicans, a group of prominent politicians filed briefs on Tuesday urging the Supreme Court to rule that extreme political gerrymandering — the drawing of voting districts to give lopsided advantages to the party in power — violates the Constitution...Charles Fried, a Harvard law professor who served as United States solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan, and who is among the lawyers representing Republican politicians urging the Supreme Court to reject extreme political gerrymanders, said it was important to take the long view and to act on principle. “It’s not a partisan issue,” he said. “We are working for our republic, and not for Republicans.”

President Donald Trump ended an Obama-era program that protects undocumented youth Tuesday, drawing the swift condemnation of several Harvard administrators...If a student’s DACA status expires—and they are no longer legally permitted to remain in the country—deportation won’t happen immediately, according to Jason Corral, the designated attorney for undocumented students in the law clinic. Students would first have to be placed in formal removal proceedings before facing deportation...Some immigration rights advocates have raised concerns that by handing over personal details to receive DACA status, DACA recipients have unwittingly given the federal government the information it needs to go after them once the program is terminated. “I think it is reasonable to be concerned about that,” Law School professor Gerald L. Neuman said. “I think there are legal arguments about whether that can be done or not, and there may be lawsuits about whether the government can do this if it tries.”

Improbable Worlds Ltd., backed by SoftBank Group Corp.’s Vision Fund, said it’s in talks for major game publishers to adopt its virtual world simulation software...Some of the games using SpatialOS aim to offer more than entertainment. Berlin-based Klang Games has teamed up with Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig to create Seed, an MMO title billed as an experiment in governance. In the game, players collaborate in colonizing a planet, balancing economic needs and environment sustainability.

Harvard Law School unveiled a memorial dedicated to slaves owned by the Royall family, whose donations helped endow the institution, at an event Tuesday evening. The plaque, which sits on a rock in the plaza between Langdell Hall and the Caspersen Student Center, reads, “In honor of the enslaved whose labor created wealth that made possible the founding of Harvard Law School. May we pursue the highest ideals of law and justice in their memory.” University President Drew G. Faust, newly appointed Dean of the Law School John F. Manning, and Law School professors Annette Gordon-Reed and Janet E. Halley each spoke at the dedication...Adrian D. Perkins, a member of the school’s student government, said seeing the monument gave him “profound happiness” as a student leader and African American student. He said the student government is planning a number of ways to address racial concerns on campus this year.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Judge Richard Posner, probably the world’s most influential legal thinker over the last half-century, retired from the federal bench on Saturday. If a Nobel Prize were to be given in law, he would be the first to receive it, solely on the basis of his academic contributions. Apart from that, he wrote more than 3,300 opinions as a federal judge. In countless areas, involving questions that grab headlines (like same-sex marriage) or highly technical matters, his analysis has proved enduring and defining.